Thomas Wolf Fullscreen Look at your house, angel. (1929)

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Will you wait for me?”

“Yes,” she said.

He leaped down on the walk just as his father lurched in from the street by the high obscuring hedge that shut the house from the spacious yard of the attorney Hall.

Gant reeled destructively, across a border of lilies, on to the lawn, and strode for the veranda.

He stumbled, cursing, on the bottom step and plunged forward in a sprawl upon the porch.

The boy jumped for him, and half dragged, half lifted his great drunken body erect.

The boarders shrank into a huddle with a quick scattering of chairs: he greeted them with a laugh of howling contempt.

“Are you there?

I say, are you there?

The lowest of the low — boarding-house swine!

Merciful God!

What a travesty!

A travesty on Nature!

That it should come to this!”

He burst into a long peal of maniacal laughter.

“Papa!

Come on!” said Eugene in a low voice.

He took his father cautiously by the sleeve.

Gant flung him half across the porch with a gesture of his hand.

As he stepped in again swiftly, his father struck at him with a flailing arm. He evaded the great mowing fist without trouble, and caught the falling body, swung from its own pivot, in his arms.

Then quickly, before Gant could recover, holding him from behind, he rushed him toward the door.

The boarders scattered away like sparrows.

But Laura James was at the screen before him: she flung it open.

“Get away!

Get away!” he cried, full of shame and anger.

“You stay out of this.”

For a moment he despised her for seeing his hurt.

“Oh, let me help you, my dear,” Laura James whispered.

Her eyes were wet, but she was not afraid.

Father and son plunged chaotically down the wide dark hall, Eliza, weeping and making gestures, just before them.

“Take him in here, boy.

Take him in here,” she whispered, motioning to a large bed-room on the upper side of the house.

Eugene propelled his father through a blind passage of bath room, and pushed him over on the creaking width of an iron bed.

“You damned scoundrel!” Gant yelled, again trying to reap him down with the long arm, “let me up or I’ll kill you!”

“For God’s sake, papa,” he implored angrily, “try to quiet down.

Every one in town can hear you.”

“To hell with them!”

Gant roared.

“Mountain Grills — all of them, fattening upon my heart’s-blood.

They have done me to death, as sure as there’s a God in heaven.”

Eliza appeared in the door, her face contorted by weeping.

“Son, can’t you do something to stop him?” she said.

“He’ll ruin us all.

He’ll drive every one away.”

Gant struggled to stand erect when he saw her.

Her white face stirred him to insanity.

“There it is!

There!

There!

Do you see!